The “Dear Carolyn” questions on the Washington Post Facebook page often present dilemmas that involve relentless long-distance travel pressure. I believe it was in Monbiot’s book HEAT that it was referred to as “Love Miles.” (My recollection could be mistaken. I’ll try to remember to look it up and get back to you here with confirmation.) Travel miles prompted by our ability in today’s world to meet and fall in love with people whose families live far far away from each other and from us. Several states away or even countries away, even entire oceans apart.
If you don’t have a Washington Post account, as I don’t, Carolyn’s replies are behind a pay wall. But, if you have Facebook, the comment section itself contains a lot of excellent answers from the general public. Below, I’m posting the question to Carolyn, and then the comment I made in response.
“Dear Carolyn: My fiancé and I recently got engaged. We graduated from college together last year and decided to live apart for a year to establish ourselves and settle into the work world.
“He is now applying for jobs in my area so we can move in together. Our university was about 20 minutes from his childhood home, and moving to join me would be the farthest from home he’s ever lived — although only a 90-minute flight away. He is the first of his family, including extended family, to move out of state.
“My future mother- and father-in-law are loving parents but have been doubting and belittling my fiancé’s decisions since graduation, with the aim of getting him to move back.
“He is now starting to doubt every decision he makes and losing confidence in his ability to navigate this already challenging time. Would it be out of line if I gently encouraged his parents to back off? Or would any interference in this family dynamic be counterproductive? — Engaged”
My response:
Side note: YOU moving so far apart from him set you guys up for this long-distance dilemma. I can see wanting to live apart for a year as in not live together, but why did you move so far away from him in the first place? (Or maybe you moved back to your family hometown.)
But anyway it creates a very common modern dilemma. The tyranny of big geography in the USA.
A 90-minute flight is like a 10-hour drive or something, isn’t it? That’s not small potatoes. In today’s world of economic instability, and increasingly extreme weather, we shouldn’t assume that air travel will continue to be such an easy option. Or even long-distance car travel.
But anyway, it doesn’t seem like your family should inherently be more important than his, in terms of who you choose to live close to. What a can of worms. (And, at every holiday and family milestone hereafter, constant lifelong pressure for expenditures of dollars and travel footprint, regardless of where you end up choosing to live near your family or his.) So many of us have been in this situation.
(End of my comment on the public Facebook post.)
Some additional thoughts I want to bring up right here now for you readers:
One thing I want to point out is how the pattern set forth in the reader’s question above so rarely even comes into question. Nobody questions relentless long-distance travel several times a year. Not only the footprint but the expense. And the terrible loneliness from not seeing one’s family day to day. It’s something that you just can’t always find a workaround unless your family loves phone and zoom. A lot of us have made tough choices.
Also unquestioned is this bias that we in the USA have against people wanting to stay near their parents! Why would we assume that somebody is dysfunctional and dependent just because they want to live near their parents?
Why? Because capitalist society has normalized the idea that we must break away and go be somewhere else in order to be full adults. I find this to be a very dysfunctional artifact of our hyper-individualistic society. (Note, of course I am not talking about people who need to break off contact with abusive family members.)
In recent years, I have noticed some young people are breaking that pattern, if only for sheer practical economic reasons. I do see families becoming less fragmented as a result, in many cases.
Later, someone responded to my comment in the comment section:
“You jumped to a lot of conclusions there. She could have moved to her current location for work reasons.”
To which I responded:
“That’s actually part of my point. (And yes inevitably there’s no way i/we have all the information.) But part of my point is that looking for jobs really far away from our loved ones let us in for a lot of hard choices.”
There’s a really good book called A Nation of Strangers, by Vance Packard. Talking about the decline of community in the USA. It came to me serendipitously via our little free library and I made it part of our permaculture headquarters educational library.
One of the root causes Packard observes for the unraveling of community is corporate jobs that actually feature regular transfers to faraway different locations. I never realized how much corporations were like the military in that regard. I grew up in a military family but now I realize that my friends who grew up in company families dealt with a lot of the same dynamic.
A book that’s probably more well-known to most people is called Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community. By Robert D. Putnam. Also very much worth reading. BTW Bowling Alone was published in 2000. A Nation of Strangers, I was surprised to see, was published way back in 1972! So we were noticing the negative effects even back when it seems like we had cohesive neighborhoods as a bit more of the norm.
Capitalism/white supremacy culture does not benefit from neighborhood cohesion. Neighborhood cohesion actually helps people stand up to unreasonable terms of employment and social acceptance. But it’s sort of a catch 22. Like, it’s really hard to build neighborhood cohesion when you’re just caught up in day-to-day survival in a job that keeps you disassociated from anything beyond “the job.” It’s challenging but you kind of have to carve out your own little bit of breathing room and build on it.
Maybe sometimes you force yourself to go out for even a five minute walk even though you’re exhausted. And on that little five minute walk you just happen to meet someone who becomes part of your real-life neighbor community.
Or, as I have often done, make myself go to the neighborhood watch meeting or citizens’ board meetings instead of staying home with a fun book! I think a lot of us have ended up building connections with each other because we prodded ourselves to do the slightly inconvenient thing.
Added later: What I said above notwithstanding, there are legitimate reasons to move far away from one’s family of origin, that have nothing to do with abusive dynamics or whatever. You can be crying your guts out with loss even while you’re feeling like you have to move away.
It can be necessary for a person to move away from family — no matter how much they love their family — in order to find their own rudder, learn how to be their own person. That’s actually what my path was, although I never dreamed it would end up creating a permanent separation. Sometimes the old saying really is true, you can’t go home again. Would I have made the same choice anyway? Yes, most likely, given the growth that I needed to undertake. But there is no question that my choice involved painful and what turned out to be permanent trade-offs. Knowing what I know now, I might have found ways to live closer, sooner.
And sometimes the job really is that good and really is that unusual that it’s not just available anywhere.
I also noticed, in the case of my response to this column, that I really replied with too much haste. It does sound like the guy was ready to move and got intimidated by his parents.
Now, it could be the guy is also having second thoughts about missing his family.
Or, it could be that the guy was just going through the motions of looking for a job to please his fiancée. I agree with a person who commented that the guy might need to live away from both his fiancée AND his parents for a while just to find out who he himself is.
But, it really just could be that the parents are very deliberately trying to disempower him and emotionally manipulate him into staying. Which obviously isn’t cool. THAT is abuse.
As often happens, I end up having to qualify or amend my words when I have responded in too much haste. Multiple things can be true. Also, if this person were actually somebody I knew, I would be speaking to her very gently and supportively, and trying to help her access her heart and sort out what her priorities were and how she really felt about the relationship.
Another dimension: Back when I was making these kinds of decisions, we weren’t having horrific natural disasters that were wiping out transportation networks for weeks or months at a time. Being cut off from family didn’t used to feel so sad or vulnerable. The feeling of vulnerability could just be my age as well. Looking back on how cavalierly I roamed about, I sometimes feel shocked.
Of course, I can reasonably be accused of just projecting my own stuff onto other people. But isn’t that what we all do when we peek into an advice column and chime in with our own advice? Inevitably it’s going to be at least somewhat based on our own experience and/or fears. But hopefully also based on love and concern for the person or people who find themselves in the hard situation.
PS. I always have to emphasize this to my readers. If anything I write comes across as berating or shaming, please be assured that is not the intent! My path isn’t the only version of a simpler life, and the things I write are only meant to be a guide that sparks other people to get creative and find their own unique path.